Generally, the complexity of nested structures does not always lend itself to the efficient storage and retrieval of such structures. Conventional efforts, to date, have not proven to be as effective or efficient as desired. Particularly, a large body of work has been developed to show how nested XML (extensible markup language) structures can be mapped to relational storage. However, conventional efforts have fallen short in being able to provide a more flexible mapping of nested structures to storage, e.g., to column-oriented storage. Potential advantages of such flexible mapping have thus been missed.